She went into partnership with the good idea. Will Etta ever be paid in
full, do you think? I'll het she will. What do you bet?
THE LIGHTER SIDE
Our Fellowship gatherings on Saturday and Sunday evenings began—
October, 1952—in the living room at Taliesin, continuing at Taliesin
West in Arizona. These Fellowship gatherings for supper and a concert,
or a reading and perhaps pertinent discussion (probably a little of these
together), as I have said, have been going on for ten years. As for me, I
have never failed to enjoy one of them. They were always happy and
always fresh—not only composed of perfectly good material, good music,
good food, enthusiastic young people, good company, but something rare
and fine was in the air of these homely events by way of environment—
atmosphere. No one felt, or looked, commonplace. The Taliesiris (Middle
West or West) are made by music for music and enter into the spirit of the
occasion as if the one were made for the other. Eye music and ear music
do go together to make a happy meeting for the mind—and the happy
union charms the soul. This happy meeting is rather rare as independent
intelligence is rare. We lived in it.
Olgivanna felt that the Fellowship—looking like the wrath of God dur-
ing the week—should wash itself behind the ears, put on raiment for
Sunday evenings and try to find its measure and its manners. Most of it
had both. In the right place too. The girls all put on becoming evening
clothes, did look, and were, charming. That clothes make a difference is
one of the justifications for our work as designers. On Sunday I scarcely
recognized some of my own Fellows of the workday week. There was
something vital and happy radiating from them all on these happy occas-
ions when everybody served everybody else as though he were somebody,
and willingly took the part in the entertainment he had been rehearsing,
Part of it, of course, was because they were where they all wanted most to
be—volunteers—doing what they most loved to do. Very much at home.
I am sure none will ever forget his share in Fellowship life on these event*
ful but simple occasions, and while the fellowships change with time and
circumstances—these events keep their character and charm nevertheless,
Many of the Taliesin young people would come because they had read
something I had written or seen my work, probably both, and dreamed of
someday working with me. They had come somehow with money begged^
borrowed, or received as a gift, from all over the United States and many
foreign countries, gratefully giving their best to Taliesin. And most of our
boys and girls were individuals by nature with an aesthetic sense rejecting
commonplace elegance. That rejection by Taliesin itself would be the
natural attraction Taliesin would have for them: the artificiality that
passed current for Art and had no place iu Taliesin's instincts nor in theirs.
To a man, the boys were naturally averse to the dull convention, eith&r;
social or aesthetic. The girls were likewise. Alexander Meiklejohn—rhim-
self the experiment at my old University (Wisconsin) and on sever&ltf
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